Wenn Kinder spurlos verschwinden
"Three and a half years later, Anita, Dagmar Funke's older daughter, committed suicide. At 19, she hanged herself in an attic. And Dagmar Funke finally lost it.
(..)
She hasn't chatted in a long time. She immediately talks about her daughters: "I cry Anita. I saw her again after her suicide, at the forensic office. I don't cry Debbie, I could only do so if I knew she was no longer alive. life. But that “I should feel it, right? I do not feel it."
On the morning of February 13, 1996, she kissed her sleeping daughter and pulled up the covers. “Goodbye, sweetheart,” she said as always. She remembers this scene in almost photographic detail. Debbie didn't have to leave the house until half an hour later. When Dagmar Funke returned from her job at the mall's juice stand around 12:30 p.m., she should have already been home from school.
Debbie didn't come home. Neither that day nor the next day. “A policeman told me: don’t get your hopes up, she’s definitely dead.”
Dagmar Funke screamed and moaned. She lay down in Debbie's bed to smell her child. She crawled into her closet to smell her child. “Little by little, it ate away at my soul. »
Valium, alcohol, destruction. Dagmar Funke could bear less and less the waiting and the fear for his child. "At first I thought I could use the power of my thoughts to take her home. But she didn't come." At one point, she only weighed 70 pounds because she thought she couldn't eat anything, while Debbie was in danger of starving to death.
Then there was hope, comfort. Dagmar Funke had two more children. And she thought: maybe life goes on after all. Until Anita commits suicide. "Anita was the least able to cope with Debbie's disappearance, she was so angry at this world in which something like that could happen. She was more radical than me, in the end I couldn't kill myself."
How much pain can a mother endure? “The longer Debbie was missing, the worse I felt,” says Dagmar Funke. She blamed herself for what had happened: because she hadn't gone to pick up her daughter from school. "I still haven't forgiven myself for that. And I should have been there more for Anita too."
After Anita's death, Dagmar Funke left her two little daughters with her ex-husband and fled to the Baltic Sea. “I stand by my decision today, as painful as it is,” she said. "I was thinking specifically about suicide at that time and the idea of taking my children with me to die. If I hadn't left, one of those family tragedies could have happened."
For years, Dagmar Funke fought for everything. On survival, on appropriate therapy, on a strategy for existing after such twists of fate. When she again thought she couldn't make it, she took sleeping pills, drank strong beer and fled to the Baltic Sea. Sea rescuers pulled them out of the cold water. It was a few years ago. When suicidal thoughts returned a few months ago, she immediately sought help at a clinic. "I want to live. Because the hope that Debbie is still alive is still very strong today."
